I had a quick fiddle with the box of bits that should by now – in fact by a year ago – be a 5.6Ghz ATV transceiver. I now have a couple of Gibeon flat panel antennas which claim 24dBi as mentioned in the excellent resource on this topic at http://5-6ghz-atv.co.uk/

So, let’s have a play. I got a rather old fashioned Sandisk Photo Album, a slab of plastic that takes 5V and will present photos (and videos and sound files) to a TV via an AV output and the typical red, white and yellow RCA plugs. First off I  needed to make sure this worked. So, what has an AV input… er… Bedroom TV? Nope. An older Sony TV in another bedroom does and so it was plugged up. And nothing. Problem 1, it seems to take an age to turn on in response to its remote control. No switch of course. Problem 2, it would not read anything on the SD card I had with a test card image on.

The only clue is it needs a ‘JPEG (Baseline, up to 16 Megapixel)’. No idea what I had produced via GIMP on the Linux box but it would not find anything at all. Maybe it’s the SD card. I found a very old 32Mb (!) SD card with some sundry photos on and those were fine. Ah, so maybe it cannot read big SD cards. Copied the test card file onto that and now it at least finds the card but says the format is unknown. After 3 iterations I fed the jpeg into Windows Paint, saved it (as jpeg) and it worked.

And success, I can send the test card image to the TV via the TS832 transmitter and RC832 receiver. Next, I tried the flat panel antennas and they worked too, not that I would have expected any less as the little rubber duck antennas worked fine.

However, offering the AV to my 12V monitor (ex eBay car reversing screen) just showed lines. No amount of shouting fixed this and it would appear that this monitor has simply died, perhaps having got fed up waiting in a box all this time.

Anyway, now I need to actually construct the thing properly and work out a mount for the antennas.